I’ve spent what feels like an inordinate amount of time this month musing on the nature of physical education and how teachers handle their mentality in tough places to teach.
Its a topic I’m passionate about…but I’m slowly realizing if I spend to much time mired in those thoughts, I start not wanting to write, and the whole damn point of this is to have some fun on my commute and avoid doom scrolling. The commute may be the original site of mass doom scrolling. I am surrounded by zombies.
So with that said, time to have some fun. Here are four quotes that I often think about and keep me driving in the right direction.
“The Definition of Success: The ability to go from failure to failure with zero loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston Churchill….allegedly
I think about this all the time, mostly because I spend so much time getting my proverbial ass kicked by life. Every new activity I try in school usually goes to hell. Every relationship I’ve had has been miserably far from perfect (my own fault for sure.) Every training session has a bit more juice to squeeze out of it.
But with every ass-kicking I receive there’s the ole reflection plus training that I have learned to fall in love with. The never ending training session that is life is under constant review, and in the midst of finding ways to get better at things, this quote always reminds me to ask the question, “how can I make this fun?”
The quote reminds me that life is an experiment of balancing your perceptions and expectations. Keep expectations low, work to perceive where I can find the positives in a shit-show day, and keep on crackin on. There’s good stuff to find if you look close enough, and there’s plenty of ways to make the challenge enjoyable.
“Better to do it, than live with the fear of it.”
-Logan Ninefingers (A character from Joe Abercrombie’s first law trilogy)
It’s beautiful in its simplicity - especially when its said by the most feared and self-reflective barbarian in the north. In a nutshell, every task that I don’t want to do is better delt with than leaving alone. I find starting an unsavory task - perhaps writing a blog post - is actually only unsavory before I get started. Once I start, the task itself isn’t that bad.
It’s just that getting started part.
Letting the anxiety hover over me is far more unpleasant than actually just getting to work. The fear of it, is worse than the thing itself. The quote reminds me to go over the hump.
“Don’t believe everything you believe.”
-Unknown
If I could make a bumper sticker this would be it. I’m a harsh examiner of my own thought processes (or at least I like to think I am) and I think everybody else should be as well. Everything we believe is mostly a narrative, and outside the realm of physics, all narratives have counter narratives.
I’ve spent countless hours examining my own cognitive dissonance, and I’ve only hardened my belief that the current beliefs I hold don’t get a free parking spot in my head for the rest of my life. They must be examined and tested from time to time, and sometimes removed when they don’t stand up to a particular reality I haven’t considered.
“Settling is just losing in sheep’s clothing.”
-Unknown
You only lost when you stop trying. If you tell yourself you settled, take a good hard look at why you’re using that word. Settling is fine in the short term, but if that’s where you stop then you lost.
I have a dream of creating an all time great strength and conditioning program of all time at the high school level. This means top of the line equipment, teams of kids getting fired up to lift, non-stop education about how to train, eat, and perform. I’ve been fighting this battle for the past seven years…and I’m nowhere close to completion.
But the gym I’ve built has come a long way, and there’s much more to come. That’s because I haven’t settled. There’s more ways to fundraise, there’s more ways to intelligently train kids, there’s more hours to spend training them, and I’m slowly going to get there.
The fight ain’t done till your dead.
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